If almost 20 years as a mentor, coach and consultant to salon owners has taught me anything, it’s that salon owners (enjoying long-term success) share one key attitude. This attitude is that they refuse to feel like a victim.

According to the dictionary a victim is ‘someone or something that’s badly affected by someone or something outside their control’. We have to accept that s**t happens,doesn’t it? Good staff leave. The tax inspector might come knocking on your door. The local council might dig up the road outside your salon. Problems like these are part of business life.

We might have to accept that problems happen, but here’s the important point, we don’t have to let them define us, limit us, or restrict our options.

Why not?

As responsible adults we always have a choice. We can choose how we respond and it’s our ‘response-ability’ –our ability to choose a positive, constructive, forward looking response – to deal with any s**t that drops on us from a great height. This is an incredibly important part of the process of developing a salon that you enjoy owning, that your team members enjoy working in and that your customers feel intensely loyal towards.

In other words, an attitude of responsibility underpins everything and (when we have it) we can choose to use the s**t t0 motivate us to be better, tougher, stronger, more caring, more focused – you decide – or we can use it as an excuse.

With my hand on my heart I can say that one of the most motivating things I get to do when I work with salon owners is help them stop making excuses and instead overcome the fear that underpins their bad habits and choices … because the good news is, once you know how, taking responsibility isn’t that hard to do!